Stephen Baxter - Bronze Summer

And again the ground shuddered, and there was a deep rocky groan, as if the mountain itself were struggling to wake from some nightmare.

In the little community called The Black, Vala was in her house — or rather Okea’s house. As the sister of Medoc’s dead wife Bel, Okea was Medoc’s oldest surviving female relative, and that was the way property was owned and inherited here, as in Northland. It was a warm day, midsummer’s day, not long after noon. The house’s hide door was thrown open to the southern light, and while everybody else was out at the Giving, Vala was taking the chance to get some work done. She used a mortar and pestle to grind up meat and boiled potato to make the soft stew that Puli liked, her second son with Medoc and her youngest child, two years old and a fussy eater since he’d been teething. It was a stew that old Okea sucked up by the bowlful too, cursing her broken teeth. Puli himself lay peacefully sleeping in his wrap on the floor at her side.

As the booms came from the fire mountain, Puli barely stirred, but Vala was increasingly uneasy.

Okea’s house had been one of the first to be built in this little settlement, and so it was in a favoured position on a stretch of high ground just before the great platform of black rock that had given the place its name. Sitting cross-legged just inside the house’s south-facing door, Vala could see a long way, over a swathe of landscape, with its clumps of birch forest and scattered farmsteads, the fires of the fisher folk smoking their catch down by the small harbour, and then the sea beyond, bright and blue and glittering. But today there was a haze over the sea, and a kind of orange tinge to the sky.

And now that big boom earlier, the more or less continuous rumbling since. What did it mean?

Mi and Liff came bustling up the slope. Mi held a rough rubber ball in her hand, a gift from the Jaguar people, a sacred token that always ended up in the hands of the kids. Liff was complaining noisily. ‘Mother, she took it off me, she took the ball.’

‘Well, you wouldn’t come home otherwise-’

‘We were playing round-the-houses! I was winning, and she just grabbed it and came in. Mother, tell her-’ He grabbed at the ball. Mi held it up, out of his reach.

Liff, ten years old, was Vala’s first child with Medoc. And Mi, twelve, was Vala’s daughter by her dead husband back in Northland. She was nearly as tall as Vala herself now, on the cusp of womanhood, but she was still enough of a kid to play. Both of them looked hot, over-excited maybe by all the fun of midsummer day, with the Giving and the bladder feast to come. But Mi looked concerned, her small, pretty face pinched.

With a sigh Vala put down her mortar and pestle. ‘So what’s this all about?’

‘She was cheating.’

‘I wasn’t. I had to make him come in. Vala, you should come out and see. Pithi and her family, and Adhao and all those nephews and nieces of his-’

‘What about them?’

‘They’re going.’

‘Going where? What do you mean, going?’

‘They’re just packing up their stuff and walking away. Down towards the coast. That’s why I stopped playing with you, stupid!’

‘All right, Mi.’

‘I thought we should come back here.’

‘That sounds sensible,’ came a voice from the gloomy house. Old Okea came shuffling forward, leaning heavily on the stick of Albian oak Medoc had carved for her. She looked oddly caved in, Vala thought, with her white-streaked hair around a weather-beaten face, her empty dugs, her knees and hips ruined by a life of hard labour. She was forty-eight years old. ‘And I’ll take the ball.’ She took it in one claw of a hand and dropped it into one of the voluminous leather bags hanging from her waist. ‘That way nobody’s cheating, yes?’

Vala looked at the older woman. ‘Everybody’s leaving, she says.’

‘Not everybody,’ said Mi.

‘Let’s take a look for ourselves.’ Okea shuffled towards the light. She glanced down at Puli as she passed, dismissive. ‘He’ll keep for a moment.’

Vala pushed down her resentment. It galled her to be subservient to an old woman who probably wouldn’t be alive if not for the support Vala gave her. But she was her husband’s sister, and this was Okea’s house, and this was the Northland way. She checked on her child for herself, then stepped out of the house after the others.

Despite the smoke and ash in the air the day was brilliant, and she blinked in the light. The community of The Black was just a dozen houses around a hearthspace of trodden earth, characteristic Northland, though the farmers’ small fields of potatoes and the penned cattle nearby were not. Today timber and turf had been heaped up at the centre of the hearthspace, in anticipation of the evening’s bonfire. And, as Mi had said, people were moving, coming out of the houses carrying children and food and bundles of clothes and tools. One man was loading up a cart to be hauled by an ox. Others, evidently meaning to stay put, hung around outside their houses or in their doorways, watching the rest, and staring at the sky to the north.

Liff turned that way and pointed. ‘ Look, mother.’

Vala turned and saw a pillar of smoke, rising to the sky. It was dark at its base, where it billowed and bubbled like the boiling mud of a hot spring. Further up, she had to tilt back her head to see, it became paler, fading almost to white, as it spread out across the sky like the branches of a tree. The cloud loomed over the mountain, the settlement, perhaps the whole island. It seemed much taller than before.

What did it mean?

‘I can see fire,’ Liff said. ‘Bits of red and white shooting up.’

‘I suppose you thought it was a thunderstorm,’ Okea said to Vala.

Vala bit back a quick response. Okea never missed a chance to get in a dig at Medoc’s new wife, a woman from what she saw as the soft country of Northland, which didn’t have any mountains at all. ‘No, Okea. I’ve been here eleven years, you know.’ Since Medoc had met her, newly widowed, at an equinoctial gathering in Etxelur. ‘And I’ve spent those years listening to that mountain grumble and burp. No, I knew it wasn’t a storm. The question is what to do about it.’ She didn’t know the behaviour of fire mountains well enough to be sure. She looked again at the adults with bundles of goods, and the children and dogs running at their feet, excited in this break in the routine.

Should they leave? She thought about her little family, Mi and Liff, two squabbling, resentful children, her infant asleep in the house, an old woman who could barely walk. It was a typical family on Kirike’s Land, or in Northland, widows and orphans, grandmothers and grandchildren, bits of broken families welded together as you might make a new sword from scraps of bronze. Now she was responsible for them all. She tried to make a mental list of all they’d have to carry for them to last two, three nights on foot or in a boat — the food, the clothes. And then there would be the walk itself, everybody weary, squabbling, the baby crying, the old lady hobbling… If only Medoc was here! But of course he was gone, off up the mountain itself, and Deri, Medoc’s son, was out on his boat somewhere, no doubt chewing the fat with his fishing companions, and laying bets on how tall the cloud would grow.

Okea was gazing at her, waiting for a decision.

She swallowed her pride. ‘Okea — I’ve never seen the mountain this bad. What do you think? Should we walk, or should we stay?’

There was a flash of triumph in Okea’s rheumy eyes. But the old woman turned away, looked at the cloud, sniffed the air. ‘Hard to say. I was only a little girl the last time it was really bad. Not much older than Puli in his swaddling. Such a fuss, walking. I would be a burden to you, I know that. The kids too. And Medoc wouldn’t know where we were.’ She started to shuffle back to the house. ‘Maybe it will blow over. It always has before. Let’s wait for Medoc. Besides, I’ve got my sewing to finish, and you have that cooking, you don’t want it to spoil.’